While Charles Babbage is remembered as the inventor of the world’s first computer, Lovelace is rightly considered to be the world’s first programmer
LORD BYRON IS one of the great Romantic heroes, his enduring reputation as much a function of his dissolute lifestyle and myriad adventures as his poetry. But his greatest creation was probably not the words he wrote, or the legend he courted, but the daughter he left behind after a year of marriage in 1816. Byron would never see his daughter grow up to become one of the most brilliant minds of her generation, her curiosity and imagination every bit as brilliant as his. But it was the field of maths that consumed her, rather than Romantic poetry. In the event, Ada Byron’s reputation was to be inextricably linked to another 19th-century British genius, who in temperament and attitude could not be much further removed from her father.
The history of computer science has many significant figures, but one of the earliest and most influential is the great Charles Babbage. Babbage was an acclaimed inventor and professor of mathematics at Cambridge University whose work on the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, extraordinarily intricate mechanical calculating devices, proved the foundation for much modern computer science.
Babbage's ambition was well ahead of his time – in his history of innovation, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson writes that "Babbage was effectively sketching out a machine for the electronic age during the middle of the steam-powered mechanical revolution".
But critical to Babbage’s success was the influence and advice of one Countess Ada Lovelace, nee Byron, whose status as Babbage’s mathematical muse rather underplays her role in the development of the Analytical Engine. While Babbage is remembered as the inventor of the world’s first computer, Lovelace is rightly considered to be the world’s first programmer.
Lovelace’s upbringing after the departure of her father was idiosyncratic, to say the least – she was just one month old when her parents separated, and less than six months old when he left England for good. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth, didn’t reveal the identity of her father to young Ada until after his death in Greece in 1824, when she was nine years old. A chronically ill childhood, with extended spells of bed rest, meant she had an interrupted education, but she became an independent-minded youth, having an affair with one of her tutors as a teenager.
She first met Babbage when she was 17, in the summer of 1833, when he was demonstrating the potential of the Difference Engine with a large-scale model in his home. By that stage she was already a precociously talented mathematician, and recognised the transformative potential of Babbage’s device immediately. At this time, however, women weren’t permitted to attend university, so her huge appetite for mathematical problems was not readily sated.
Indeed, it was not until nearly a decade later that she found such an outlet when she began an intense working relationship with Babbage. By this time, the indefatigable inventor had moved on from the disappointing reception his Difference Engine received, instead conceiving of the even more ambitious Analytical Engine – the first more akin to a calculator, the second a fully-fledged computer. The intervening years also saw Augusta Ada Byron become Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, having married William King, the Earl of Lovelace in 1838, and borne three children.
Throughout this period Lovelace continued a correspondence with Babbage, and he came to describe her as “the enchantress of numbers”, a cumbersome nickname, perhaps, but one that stuck nonetheless. In 1842 Babbage presented his plans for the Analytical Engine at a conference of mathematicians in Sardinia, and a young Italian engineer (and future Italian prime minister) called Luigi Menabrea wrote up a report on Babbage’s plans in French, so that the plans might gain currency across Europe.
Lovelace then spent the best part of a year translating and expanding Menabrea’s report, though accounts differ as to whether she did this at Babbage’s behest or not. The flurry of correspondence between the two, however, was key to advancing the promise of the Analytical Engine – in effect, together they drew up the earliest, inchoate blueprints of computer science.
“The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere ‘calculating machines’,” Lovelace wrote. “It holds a position wholly its own . . . A new, a fast, and a powerful language is developed . . . in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means thitherto in our possession have rendered possible.”
The great potential of the Analytical Engine was not to be realised in their lifetimes, however – the sheer engineering complexity and supposed lack of applicability meant funding was impossible, so ultimately the Engine was to remain in the realm of Babbage and Lovelace’s shared imagination.
James Gleick, in his latest book The Information, describes the relationship between Babbage and Lovelace: "Lady Lovelace adored her husband but reserved much of her mental life for Babbage. She had dreams, waking dreams, of something she could not be and something she could not achieve, except by proxy, through his genius."
Lovelace was certain of her own brilliance, at one point boasting in a letter to her mother that “owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perception of some things, which no one else has; or at least very few, if any . . . I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.”
Her reputation endures – Ada Lovelace Day is marked to recognise the role of women in the fields of science and engineering and this year was held just a few weeks ago, on October 7th. In the end, however, Lovelace’s life was as brief as her famous father’s – she died of uterine cancer at the age of 36, the same age at which Lord Byron succumbed to fever while fighting in the Greek War of Independence. Despite not having seen her father since she was an infant, Lovelace requested that she be buried beside him in Nottinghamshire.
